MUSIC
Busdriver: The Avatar of 'Less Yeses, More No's' in the Era of 'Yes, We Can'
/ Ben Bush
04.10.09
“That’s the problem with underground hip-hop is that we don’t have street cred with niggas in the hood,” Busdriver expounded from the stage of Los Angeles’ El Rey Theatre while muscularly wearing a mauve polo shirt. “College kids just download the shit, so it’s a small demographic we’re chasing after.” Opening for UK grime rapper Dizzee Rascal and Definitive Jux label head El-P at the end of a month long tour, Busdriver tore through his song lyrics at nearly double the already astonishing speed of his albums, pulsating around the stage, feigning anger and ecstasy, a mist of perspiration rising up into the stage lights while he freestyled about walking down Wilshire Blvd. in cowboy spurs. At one point he grabbed a life-sized cut-out of an eighties gold chain-wearing rapper and thrust the microphone into its face and––perhaps in an effort to catch his breath––demanded, “Now sing your part.”
Besides his remarkable speed, what sets Busdriver’s style apart is his use of polysyllables, unusual imagery, convoluted grammar and melody: singing as much as rapping on songs like “Casting Agents and Cowgirls,” in which his vocals toll like bells and then walk like a bass line. His choice of tourmates and collaborators, have placed him in the sometimes contentious position of bridging the gap between indie rock and tenable hip-hop: recording with members of Deerhoof, The Unicorns and CocoRosie. A recurring producer on Busdriver’s albums is Daedelus, sometimes known as Alfred Darlington, an electronic music oddball who performs his live shows in Victorian formalwear while manipulating loops from 78 rpm records as they blip across a Monome, a device which looks something like an enormous 100-button lit-up telephone keypad.
Busdriver was born in Los Angeles as Regan Farquhar, his father, Ralph, was the screenwriter of seminal hip-hop film Krush Groove (1985). “That was the film that made LL Cool J, Kurtis Blow and Run DMC into the superstars of rap at that time,” Farquhar has said. “It let me know that hip-hop was valid and made it seem realistic to be a rapper.” Farquhar has moved away from his hometown only briefly: a stint at a boarding school in Arizona and a year at the American University in Paris where he studied philosophy.
Besides his remarkable speed, what sets Busdriver’s style apart is his use of polysyllables, unusual imagery, convoluted grammar and melody: singing as much as rapping on songs like “Casting Agents and Cowgirls,” in which his vocals toll like bells and then walk like a bass line. His choice of tourmates and collaborators, have placed him in the sometimes contentious position of bridging the gap between indie rock and tenable hip-hop: recording with members of Deerhoof, The Unicorns and CocoRosie. A recurring producer on Busdriver’s albums is Daedelus, sometimes known as Alfred Darlington, an electronic music oddball who performs his live shows in Victorian formalwear while manipulating loops from 78 rpm records as they blip across a Monome, a device which looks something like an enormous 100-button lit-up telephone keypad.
Busdriver was born in Los Angeles as Regan Farquhar, his father, Ralph, was the screenwriter of seminal hip-hop film Krush Groove (1985). “That was the film that made LL Cool J, Kurtis Blow and Run DMC into the superstars of rap at that time,” Farquhar has said. “It let me know that hip-hop was valid and made it seem realistic to be a rapper.” Farquhar has moved away from his hometown only briefly: a stint at a boarding school in Arizona and a year at the American University in Paris where he studied philosophy.
